Open Fields

I’m sitting on the bus and trying to write and it’s very distracting. The man next to me keeps putting his hands on his head, circling his elbows, and wafting the fumes from his underarms in my direction, and all that my body and mind are able to register is the one million dead bacteria entering my nostrils. It smells like balls that are dead. Dead! And I am reminded that death is, in fact, all around us. Yes, life is abundant as well, but we mustn’t forget the death. These two sisters dance together in the air we breathe and the food we eat, and please notice how I say sisters. They might even be conjoined twins; inseparable.

Let me explain.

Johnny is the best cat. He really is. He is the perfect blend of sweet, cuddly, and playful. He also wears a tuxedo, has big swirling eyes of turquoise and gold, and has a face like a small child. He is literally an angel. (Except that one time he peed on me in my sleep, but I had been neglecting him a bit… so we’ll look the other way.)

Because of his complete and utter angelicness, I have always sworn to make sure he was healthy and happy. I have always bought him expensive wet catfood (even grain free cat food back when I was a ballin casino attendant), and have gotten him extensive veterinary care. However, he has had a respiratory infection since I’ve had him, and the vets don’t know what's wrong with him. Because of this constant sickliness, death has always felt like a looming presence in his life (maybe not to him, but at least to me). However, he has continued to snot rocket on my face happily and relatively healthily for the last seven years. Until a few months ago.

My boyfriend and I had just returned from a mini vacation with my family. We had pawned Johnny off on my friend during our trip, even though he threw up all over her on the car ride from our place to hers (I figured it was just car sickness). When we returned and I went to pick him up from the friend’s house, I was given a shell of my former cat. Johnny was skin and bones and wouldn’t eat. He was dying. Thoughts of my last cat (and of her tongue hanging out of her mouth as she lie lifeless and open-eyed on the vet table) rushed back to me. I had left Johnny for days in the hands of an irresponsible friend. I had failed another angel.

My last cat, Kelly, was also quite the angel. She was a sassy, voluptuous, cream white princess with large blue eyes and the softest squeak of a meow that you’ve ever heard. People loved her too, though not quite as much as Johnny. However I obviously loved her all the same. She was just more choosey, she expected a person to have to work a little for her affection.

My family adopted Kelly and her brother Regis when I was 11 years old; and when I was 22 - a few months after moving Kelly out of the family home and into my apartment - I found out she had liver cancer. Perhaps it was from the shitty, dry, bargain cat food we had always fed her. Or maybe it was because she missed home and I was too busy for her with my all-important-22-year-old-social-life. But either way she was about to die sorta early, and it was sorta my fault.

My suspicions were confirmed a month after her death in a dream. In the dream I was on an epic road-trip. Kelly was with me. After what felt like a few weeks on the road, Kelly spoke to me. It wasn’t real speak (I didn't hear a human voice instead of her squeaks) but she communicated with me that I had places to go; places she couldn’t go, and that she couldn't keep up with me anymore. In that dream I then went to Hawaii. One year later - in real life time and space - I was working on a farm in Hawaii.

Let’s back up to another “dream” though. This is a “dream” I had only six months before the Kelly dream; which was only five months before the Kelly death. This is the “dream” that I remember most of any “dream”, and just know that as I write this “dream” story, I will surely start crying. I already am.

It started I was in a forest. It was the greenest forest I had ever been in. It glowed. I was in a gulley in this forest and I was walking along it. In the distance I saw rays of light coming through the trees. And then, just in front of this light, a long stream of deer began leaping over the gully and disappearing again into the trees. I ran to the deer, and as I got closer I could see that they were transforming mid-air into creatures only half deer. Bottom half: deer. Top half: human. I followed them.

These creatures were running into an open field in the middle of the forest, but they stayed in their line. They ran around the perimeter of this field, and as they ran they transformed more and more, until they were in their final form. When each being completed their transformation they would stop moving and face me. They created a line around the perimeter of the open field, and soon I was surrounded by human-like beings (except I could tell that they most definitely were not human... they were shinier).

These beings seemed happy, luminous, colorfully dressed, and expressive. They were all also very unique and different from one another. And they were all smiling at me. Eventually, one of them stepped forward and asked me if I knew what they were. I hadn’t even wondered (or cared) up until this point, and was taken off-guard; but I thought about it for a minute. Then an answer rushed into me. “Dream characters!?”

At this the being just gave me a smirk. I was not given a yes or a no, instead just a crooked smile accompanied by the feeling of being home in this open field. And then the really crazy thing happened.

I was woken up.

“Landon!” I heard a voice say urgently. But nobody was in my room. But I knew that voice. It was the voice of my older brother. Oh yeah, I told him I would call him this morning. We’re supposed to do yoga together. But I didn’t get out of bed; I didn’t call him; though I knew he was feeling so ready to hitch a ride back home. And so I let myself fall back asleep, back asleep into nothing important at all. I only recall blackness for the rest of my sleep that morning. Blackness until I was woken up by my younger brother. “Hey. wake up. Nathen is in the ER. He tried to kill himself.” Nathen was always good at everything he tried.

My younger brother woke me up today too. I was making a pigeon out of clay when he called. “I just wanted to let you know that Neptune bit Regis really bad, and that R egis was already really old and sick... We had to put him down…” Then through tears in his voice, “And I stayed with him the whole time. It was so hard, man...”

His Regis was my Kelly, but for seven years longer. “I was there with Kelly when she was put down too. There’s nothing I can say to make it better, I’m so sorry, Jeremy. Just know he’s in a better existence now...”

There never really is anything you can say.

“I know. It’s just still just so fucking hard, man. Regis has been my best friend for so long. He was there for me through so much. Like when Nathen died. Or when I was depressed and alone in Missoula... I honestly don’t think I’d be around still without him man.”

“I know… I know how you feel. I’m so sorry Jeremy.”

“Thanks man… The hardest part was that he seemed to have so much life in him still. Like they gave him the first shot to relax him, you know? And then they gave him the poison… But he fought it anyways. He was fighting to stay alive so they had to give him another one. It was so fucked up man...”

Then the sobbing….

And he was condemned to the same fate as I when Kelly passed. He figured his coworkers would understand that the death of a “pet” is the death of a family member. They didn’t. They made us come to work, despite how “sorry they were for our loss”.

Looking back there has been a lot of death in my family over the past 10 years. The cats, my brother, both of my grandparents…. and the first of the decade; my aunt.

My aunt and Nathen were very close. We were all raised Mormon, and my grandparents were basically super Mormons. My aunt was not a "good Mormon", however, and neither was my older brother. And as the “bad examples” of the family, they took solace in each other. I remember many family-get-togethers they would drive up together to grandma’s house, Nathen’s subwoofers vibrating my toes, squinty-eyed and ready to poke fun at my loud and controlling grandmother - as well as the rest of us.

And thank GOD for them. Whatever god is, it truly sent them. My family would have been quite boring without them, and we might have even drifted apart without "their sacrifices". They each made the biggest statement they could make to get us to wake up to each other. Two giant “LOVE EACH OTHER BETTER”s that we couldn’t ignore any longer.

My little sister was only 14 on the night that our aunt decided to stick out her middle finger and hitch a ride back home. And when we heard the news the next day, my sister told me that she'd had a dream that night in which my aunt was very happy. She had been running and laughing, and dancing in an open field.